Here’s Why Racial Profiling Doesn’t Work

Vox: “It’s not hard to figure out why school officials and police in Irving, Texas, decided to arrest, interrogate, and suspend a 14-year-old student who had brought in a homemade clock. The student, Ahmed Mohamed, comes from a family that is Muslim and of Sudanese descent.”

“According to security experts, profiling doesn’t work, and may actually be counterproductive … Here is the fundamental problem with racial and religious profiling: It is impossible to figure out who ‘looks’ like a terrorist.”

“So if you limit your profiling system to young Middle Eastern–looking men, like Ahmed, terrorists can and do use people who just look different from that. No matter how inclusive the system, this will always be a problem. Profiling, then, could actually make us less safe: It gives terrorists a how-to guide for evading extra airport screening and police attention.”

“‘Targeted policing may actually increase total incidents of terrorism by encouraging the non-profiled group members to engage in terrorist acts — since the price to them has decreased,’ Columbia University scholar Bernard Harcourt wrote in a 2006 study.”

“Profiling makes sense if you believe that only people who look a certain way are capable of committing a certain crime. But this is not only unfounded, as actual security experts know — it also relies on lazy and, yes, bigoted thinking about who might and might not commit acts of terrorism.”

they also study behavior and other substantive signs extremely carefully

Detroitdic

Racial profiling impossible to completely remove from even your own mind. Realistically, we probably will have to settle for awareness of our proclivities and try to use that awareness to avoid the worst of our errors. It is also true that persons who are subject to unfairness are capable of “in your face” attitudes that are likely to stimulate a response that guarantees racial profiling will be used.